When I was 13 or so, I started a Livejournal. I don’t remember who got me into Livejournal, but I spent hours writing updates, working on my background, color scheme, and profile pics. (I think if you had the unpaid version you got a total of three profile picture slots. Memory was pretty sparse back then it seems.) When facebook came around, I gradually transitioned over. (I remember feeling strongly about the fact that facebook was stupid and would never catch on.) Like all of us, as Facebook got bigger, I stopped updating by livejournal, or the blogger that replaced it. And then I moved to Twitter. Oh, and then I got married, and I had someone to talk to, so I didn’t have this compulsion to write down all my thoughts on a carefully designed page. So this all feels like a return to form, albeit 18 years later.

That said, I’m writing it in vim, building it via Hugo, and committing it to github, which to be honest feels a like it’s harder than it needs to be, but then it is free.

I think this post will be about happiness. Future ones might be more scientific.

Full disclosure, I am largely just trying to figure out how to format things here. The template had these paragraph tags, but it honestly doesn’t even seem like they do anything. One day I might even learn how to make something bold, or insert an image or something. But let’s not get crazy. So, happiness:

Like most people at the moment, I’m 100+ days into Covid, and working from home was starting to wear on me. So I set out my simple plan to acheive happiness by trying to do a few things each day:

  1. Get dressed.
  2. Do at least one thing I am really excited about doing.
  3. Talk to at least one person outside of my house and work.
  4. Get one work task done. Get one home task done.
  5. Only waste time on things that I really love doing.

The last one is maybe the most important. I had found myself in this cycle of feeling that I couldn’t do anything that wasn’t extremely productive. I’m towards the end of my PhD, and all I need to do to finish is write all the time, non-stop, until I’m done. So I never felt like I could take breaks to play video games, or exercise, or watch movies, or camp or rock climb, or do any of the other many things I actually enjoy. However, I also couldn’t really work non-stop, so I would just end up lounging on the couch, doom scrolling the most recent Covid news, or looking at facebook, or watching really stupid YouTube videos. I still got plenty done, it’s not like I was spending all my time on Twitter, but all the time I didn’t spend working, I spent doing really miserable crap, that I felt guilty about but that was in no way fulfilling. And I found myself becoming more and more miserable, and less and less motivated to work or play or do anything really. Saying I was becoming depressed is probably an overstatement, but I certainly wasn’t becoming excited.

So I decided that I would just stop doing pointless things, outright. I think all things can be organized on two axes: Difficulty and Satisfaction. Many great things fall in the “very difficult, very satisfying” region, but lots of perfectly good things happen in the “Easy, satisfying” area. Meanwhile, I was spending all my time in “Easy, unsatisfying,” which is a pretty stupid place to hang out. Since then, when I’ve felt uninspired, or just tired, I stop working for a bit, and do something fun. I play video games (right now I’m working on Okami), or watch a show, or design a website, or work on my DnD campaign. There are lots of things I enjoy doing, and I find I can do that for a little bit, and go back to work, and feel a lot better about life than when I just scroll through twitter until I get bored or panicky enough to force myself to go back to work.

So that’s my plan, and so far it’s led to some great stuff. I’ve found myself being far more productive, and also a lot happier. So if you find yourself completely exhausted and overwhelmed by the horrors of our current existence, consider how much of your time is spent on things that are both utterly pointless and bring you no joy. And consider replacing those with things that are utterly pointless and bring you some joy. I think that’s a good place to start, given our current situation.

So that’s my first blog post, I think I will try to do these weekly, many of them will probably me more scientific. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Check me out on twitter for more frequent, much shorter thoughts.

Good luck, be happy.

~Ammon